Title: The First Having Been An Aberration
Author: ExcentrykeMuse
Wordcount: 1.7k (but this one is GOING to get longer)
Rating: PG13
Fandom(s): IronMan 2 / Post-Deathly Hallows (EWE)
Pairing(s): Harry/Natascha, (past) Harry/Ginny, Tony/Pepper
Prompt: For “Tracie Lawson”: I would love to see some harry potter and avenger cross over. Especially where harry is related to one of them.
Warning(s): Bittersweet Ending, Natascha is posing as Natalie Rushman, Tony is dying (canon, he lives), Ginny Bashing, EWE, references to possible abortions, possible Hermione bashing (up to interpretation, Harry is not a Potter, Harry has lost his magic, THIS WILL BE CONTINUED
“You’re not supposed to be in here—I understand this is Mr. Stark’s private office.”
Harry rolled his eyes and pointed to the ceiling even though he knew the A.I. didn’t have eyes.
Right on cue, J.A.R.V.I.S. stated, “Master Harry is related to the Master and has full access to this sector.”
Harry looked up to the ceiling, slightly bemused, and, shouted, “Thanks!”
“Need I remind you, Master Harry,” J.A.R.V.I.S. pointed out for the thirteen time that day, “you need not shout for me to hear you.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said loudly to himself because, really, when did he get to pretend to be a wizard who didn’t understand Muggle technology except when he visited his half-brother, Tony? Now that he’d lost his magic, he found it even more amusing. Turning his attention to the interloper, he asked, “you new?”
“Yes, sir,” the leggy ginger answered, and damn if Harry didn’t have a thing for leggy gingers. He always did—so did his brother. It always ended badly, or he assumed it did.
Ginny had just recently kicked him out of their cottage and claimed that she “couldn’t take it anymore” and told him she wanted a no contest divorce. Losing his magic on the job as an auror wasn’t his fault after all, but she couldn’t live with a Muggle. Which was why he was here. He had the papers, and he needed lawyers to look them over. He wasn’t a wizard so he couldn’t have a wizarding lawyer. Also, he didn’t want any squib lawyer back in the wizarding world getting wind of the divorce and somehow tipping of the press or—worse—Mrs. Weasley, before he got his head on straight.
“Are you from Legal?” Harry asked after taking in the full amount of the gorgeous that was this woman and, before she answered, he levied his leather satchel with the 400 pages of parchment onto the desk he was sitting in front of. This woman was probably from Legal, given that she had to be given access to the guest office in Tony’s Malibu home.
She smirked and nodded, glancing around the office once before taking a seat across from him. “I was briefed that it was personal Stark business but nothing else.” She smirked again. “You look a bit like him, now that I think about it.”
That as the Potter charm at work—only it wasn’t Potter charm. Lily had stepped out on James when she’d been unable to get pregnant and realized the problem lay with James Potter’s pureblood genes. Needless to say, Howard and stepped out on Maria once in awhile as well and like his sons (Tony Stark and Harry Potter), he had a thing for gingers.
“It’s my divorce,” Harry told her. “Somewhere in here,” he placed his hand on the leather satchel, “must be why she’s actually divorcing me. I don’t buy an accident on the job.”
Ginny didn’t care about the magic. They practically lived like Muggles. No, it had to be something else. She had to be after the money or she must have found someone else at some point that she was throwing Harry over for. She must … surely?
The interloper looked between him and the parchment. “It’s not the fact that you mentally undressed me as soon as I walked in?” she asked, turning the satchel toward her and grappling with the parchment inside. Like the champion Harry could tell she was, she didn’t comment on the fact that it was parchment and that it was handwritten in ink.
He breathed out and told her, “I have never broken my marriage vows.”
She looked at him over the parchment and then nodded. “Kids?”
That had him looking away. “I suspected she aborted—” but he closed his eyes, unable to verbalize the rest. He’d been so sure that one time, until Ginny had disappeared for a few days with Hermione and then gone back out on the field with the Harpies, as if nothing had happened.
“Okay,” she told him, leafing through the first half dozen sheets. “Does she know you’re connected to the Starks?”
This had him outright laughing. “No. No idea. But I’m wealthy in my own right. Title, back in England. Nothing quite like this, but substantial.”
She opened her mouth, but he said, “I was born on the wrong side of the blanket.”
“Not too wrong, considering your assets,” she murmured, now clearly in the financial section of the report. “Leave these with me, Mr.—”
“Harry,” he supposed, “Just Harry.”
“Harry, then,” she agreed. “And if she’s trying to make it look like she’s leaving you because you can’t become Police Commissioner over at Scotland Yard, I’ll have her twisted up and around like a New York pretzel before I’m finished with her.”
For a moment, a mental image sprung to his mind that did not involve his wife. He looked over at the interloper and asked, “Is that a promise?”
“I don’t practice divorce law, but Miss Potts was right to send me over. I am the best. I am also good looking, and Stark men have a type. I’ll drive Mrs. Harry wild with jealousy if she so much as wonders if you have me lined up to take her place if we go to litigation.”
Pausing a moment, Harry asked, “So you wouldn’t be willing to show me a genuine pub you just happen to know just south of 15th street?” He let the Potter charm ooze into his smile, lopsided as it was, and got one in exchange for his trouble.
“Let me make you a free man, Harry, before I show you any pubs you already know about.”
Harry drummed his fingers. “The documents stay in this office.”
“It goes without saying,” she agreed. “I shall be living and breathing Malibu for the next 72 hours while I live the case.—You’ll be available, then, if I have any questions.” It wasn’t a question. They both knew it was true.
Harry grinned at her. “Tony won’t have it otherwise. He wants to catch up. He’ll try to leverage this as an excuse to get me to drop the name ‘Potter’ for ‘Stark.’”
“Well,” she purred, flipping over a piece of parchment causally, “at least I now know to call you ‘Mr. Stark’ in public so as not to gain his ire.”
“You’re depressed,” Harry commented as he looked up at his elder brother, “and my wife aborted my child. I’m sure of it now that I’ve said it out loud.”
“Harsh,” Tony agreed, mouth twisting. “I would have liked a little Stark to leave everything to.”
“If you give me my law-wizard’s—lawyer’s name,” Harry corrected, “I can get on that.”
“I sent you the one who could take Happy in the ring,” Tony mused as he drank the last of his Guinness. “I thought I’d make her my personal assistant to piss Pepper off—she still won’t let me take her out on a date—but you had sent an actual email, so I knew the world was ending.”
“You called it,” Harry agreed, thinking back to the night before his wedding, when Tony had been the last man standing (all the Weasleys drunk under the table) and Tony had asked him, “are you sure?” and Harry had blustered through the question enough so that Tony just accepted the answer.
Tony hummed and looked out over the bay. “So, you like Natalie then?”
Harry swung around, “Is that her name? I’ve been calling her ‘Scarlett’ in my mind?”
This had Tony sniggering but then he turned toward Harry and grinned. “No. Natalie Rushman.”
Harry sighed after a moment and set his can aside, looking out over the waves. “I don’t know how to be a Muggle, not really. I never knew how to be rich. What would I do to make a woman like that notice me?”
“Well,” Tony wheedled. “She thinks you have some injury from the force. It would make sense you would come home to Malibu and do some soul searching with your brother. I could segue it into a job in security, something behind a desk, and you would be respectable and home by five for the Mrs.”
“There is something to be said for a life like that,” Harry sighed.
“You could have it,” Tony whispered. “Have a kid. Maybe I’ll live long enough to see him.”
An awful twist of a smile spread over Harry’s lips. “Could be a girl.”
“Even better,” Tony declared. “Find a nice girl and settle down—for me—”
Shoving his hand into his owl’s nest of hair, Harry admitted, “I thought I had.”
“So did I,” Tony murmured.
The brothers stood there, overlooking the bay, until the cold pushed them inside. Harry half-carried his older brother inside, dropping him on a couch before, after deliberating for longer than he would admit, he stopped by the guest study and looked in on Natalie. She was hunched over the parchment with the remains of sandwich and several water bottles spread out.
“Tea?” he offered, and instead of scaring her as he thought he might, she simple smiled and let her gaze flick toward him.
“Were you thinking of offering me coffee?”
“A gentleman would never offer a lady coffee,” he promised. “I am quite good at making tea.”
“Tea then,” she agreed, lowering her gaze once more.
And he looked at her—really looked, at the light shining off her hair that was more red than ginger, at the slope of her shoulders, at the curve of her neck, and he decided he’d do everything in his power to make sure that Tony was alive to be best man at his wedding.
The first one, after all, having only been an aberration.
To Be Continued…
Excentryke's Musings 